I dabbled with Linux on and off several times over the last 20 years but never stuck with it for long, usually because of some giant pain in the ass getting some piece of hardware to work properly, plus I like to play games too and that used to be a huge stumbling block.

Microsoft’s escalatingly shitty behavior around Windows 11, combined with how much desktop Linux has matured with things like Proton/Heroic Launcher/Bottles solving most of the compatibility problems finally pushed me over the threshold for a full switch to Linux.

I’ve been running Linux-only (first Mint, then Fedora) on my laptop for about 2 years now without problems, and finally took the plunge on my desktop PC about a month ago. Massive props to Proton for making this feasible now. I have Windows 11 installed on a spare 256GB SSD that I had just in case there was some kind of show-stopper that I needed to go back to, but haven’t booted back into it since making the switch except for one time to check that it works.

Once the gaming problem was solved (I’m not worried about kernel level anti-cheat because I’m not into that type of game), the last thing tying me to Windows was Adobe Lightroom. I do miss Lightroom and I’m not as skilled using the FOSS alternatives to that product, but I just decided ‘fuck it’, Adobe are assholes with them making Lightroom subscription-only anyways.

It is so nice not being nagged to use one drive or sign in with a Microsoft account and have bullshit slop content shoveled at me by my operating system any more. Seriously, fuck outta here with that no-local-accounts horseshit.

Anyway, not going back any time soon.

As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.

In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).

So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn’t want to spend much time in my office when I wasn’t working anymore.

So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife’s machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.

There’s still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn’t there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn’t have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.

Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.

I have told this story several times.

In late 2013 or so, I bought a Raspberry Pi 1B as part of my amateur radio hobby. I did all my actual work on a Windows laptop, the Pi was pretty much just a toy, and I learned a little about Linux with it.

Mid-2014, the display in my aging laptop died. I was going back to school that fall, I needed a laptop. So I ordered a high end Inspiron from Dell. And Dell sold me a lemon. That laptop would just…shut off and never turn back on again. And then I’d call Dell’s tech support. They’d send a tech out within a week or two. He’d throw a part in it, and then it would last somewhere between days and seconds. After waiting over a week to get a tech to come out and fix it, it didn’t finish booting before it died again. I finally got them to replace the laptop outright, with a system that lacked many of the features I had explicitly ordered.

I am no longer a Dell customer.

That whole time, I needed a computer, and the only thing I had was that Raspberry Pi in addition to my Galaxy S4. It was real fun typing up homework in LibreOffice on a single core 700Mhz ARMv6 and 512MB of RAM.

I finally got a running Dell, after an entire semester, loaded with Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 was a total pube fire. Linux felt more familiar at that point, so I tried a few different systems, discovered Linux Mint, and 11 years later I don’t have any computers that run Windows.

First it was for performance, OpenSuse back in like 2004, since then its just what I’m familiar with. I don’t feel like I need to fight the OS like I do on windows machines.

Sometimes I have to use windows in a VM or I need some Software that only works on 2000/XP (psxn00b sdk) and for that I have an old machine that I use.

Because I can tell it to do whatever I want. I get to control the device I own. Pretty basic. Same principle for my others devices, so deGoogle Android phone, earbuds with open source firmware, keyboard with open source firmware, Zigbee for IoT, etc. My stuff should do what I want.

Freedom. No company tells me what I can and cannot do with MY machine.

Because of Windows.

Linus Torvalds pointed a gun at my head and said “give up Windows, or else…”

Linux requires tinkering and Windows doesn’t? Is that some alternate-universe version of Windows? In my experience, the difference is social/psychological. When Windows fucks up, “everybody uses it,” so the blame falls on the masses, not the user, who was just going along with what’s normal and expected. People sort of mentally elide memory of the Windows fuck ups, because that’s just how Windows is.

Linux is different and weird, and you have to stray from the herd to use it. Straying from the masses is scary, because when Linux fucks up, it’s your fault for being contrary. That threat to one’s place in the social order is quite memorable. Hence the reluctance of Windows users, who hate it, to even consider trying another OS that they know nothing about.

I never switched from Windows. I never used Windows as my main OS. I had an Amiga, then learned Unix on SunOS, so I was used to being weird. Once I got a PC, I used FreeBSD. It did require a lot of fiddling back in those days, and when I got tired of that, I switched to Ubuntu, which was amazing in that it Just Worked™. (Aside from manual installation of the Windows driver for the PCMCIA WiFi card with NDISWrapper.)

(I still do tinker with it, and sometimes break it, but the base OS has been rock solid. I noticed the other day that my main PC was installed with Ubuntu 18.04, and upgraded to 24.04.)

told this story before but windows 10 force rebooted overnight after spending hours fucking with it so it doesn’t, while still being able to update manually.

lost me quite a bunch of work that was rendering in the background and the important deadline. lost the will to further put up with microsoft.

I was always curious but never moved over completely because I had this idea that it was difficult to run things (games, etc). I had a laptop with dual boot with Ubuntu for the longest time, then I started to use WSL to code.

The thing that made me finally switch was the steam deck. It showed me it was possible and now we don’t have a single machine with Windows at home.

Thinking about it now, I don’t know why everyone kept recommending to use Ubuntu, it was probably one of the main reasons why it took me so long to switch.

Its more why don’t I use osx anymore and why did I use windows so long. After osx came out in the new millenium and when the apple warranty was tops I was a total mac person. And yes because it was something that just works out of the box and with the warranty you did not need to worry about anything for at least 3 years. This made the extra cost worth it. It was more out of the box than windows because you could, for example, burn a disc right out of the box. I stopped doing macs when they blamed their magentic cable sheaths coming off as from use and would not cover it (at one point you could come in with a mac with a cracked screen and they would not blink and get it replaced for ya. no questions asked. Although not specifically spelled out it effectively was an accident warranty to.) So with the warranty not being any better than a windows machine the extra cost was no longer worth it. Concurrently mac went down this simplicity path (the iphonification of macs) wereas previous to that they use to extol their power and greater number of ports. Basically my last mac was the last version of the mac book pro that had a dvi slot and lots of ports in general and was large and powerful. Now linux at that point had gotten much better than it used to be in the first decade of the millenium, but yeah. It was not exactly out of box. Zorin os had just started but again was not quite there. In addition much of my work things were windows and I had this sweet solution for computer support with my wife where I got thre laptops that were cheap in a bang for the buck way and it was a nice solution for tech support for my wife. So I was on windows. Also portable apps made windows really easy to update and migrate hosts. Eventually my wife wanted to much of gaming machines to the point we got her a desktop so my tech solution was sorta out the window but there was work and the portable apps thing (I at one point voted for portable apps as the best open source enabler). Zorin had gotten much better (out of box linux distro) and I was aware of it and played with it (along with other things like puppy) but inertia won out. Then windows 11 came along and it was a no go. Especially when I was already aware of a linux distro that was as out of the box as osx and maybe a bit better really (which keep in mind was more out of the box than windows). So I finally said enough is enough and installed zorin on my old laptop. What sucks is app image is so close to what portable apps brings and it has some related projects that have the components of it but just is not packaged nicely all together in a one and done.

poverty; i couldn’t afford a windows license.

Windows is such a horrible experience and MS is such a horrific company.

I was an edgy teenager and wanted to be different. I was already kind of into coding and it made it quite easy to try out different languages and environments.

In those days I had fun finding equivalents to Windows-only apps like MSN, and finding games that worked in Linux like UT2004 and TrueCombat:Elite. It was never a perfect solution so I always kept, and still do keep, a Windows installation around for gaming. I don’t give a shit if MS harvests my data - what are they gonna do, advertise to me? Good luck with that. But for day-to-day stuff I am far too used to how Linux works to go back. I figure Windows has improved a lot in terms of reliability and usability since those days (and if you don’t care about data harvesting or really old hardware, those are the remaining major reasons not to want to use Windows nowadays) so it might be that if I were in the same position today I’d never make the switch, but hey.

It means I don’t really like the religious OS wars that erupt here. Like OK, there are MS irritations we’re not dealing with, but what I am dealing with is that some esoteric combination of events means that a couple of times a week my laptop stops recognising my dock and all USB devices connected to it until I reboot - including if I plug the devices in directly to the laptop!

If I were just some random user who had just switched, that would send me back to whichever OS I had come from in an instant. So I feel like it’s important to be sensitive and empathetic to that.